#417 – From YouTube to Amazon: David Quintieri on Merging Content and E-Commerce

#417 - From YouTube to Amazon: David Quintieri on Merging Content and E-Commerce Kevin King: Welcome to episode 417 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week we're talking YouTube, talking image optimization, talking how do you find out what's keep up, what's going on in the Amazon world and a whole lot more. Plus what it's like being based internationally and sell on Amazon US and some of the challenges around that. Really cool episode with Helium 10 Elite member David Quintieri. Enjoy this episode. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Speaker 2: Let's do this. Unknown Speaker: Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King: Mr. David, how are you doing? Welcome to the AM PM Podcast, man. Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be on, doing great. Kevin King: Now, have you done a bunch of podcasts before or no? Are you a podcast virgin? Speaker 2: I have done podcasts, but in a, you know, from a different world, let's call it in financial aspects, but I am scheduled to be on with Mina from Trivium as well. So, we'll see if this becomes a new thing. Kevin King: Podcasts are cool. I mean, I just came from back in, was it August? I actually went with my buddy Norm to a podcast movement show in Washington DC and all these podcasters there. And then I went from that the following week to a YouTube show, all the YouTube creators. So it's really interesting. This whole industry is a lot of stuff going on in this whole podcasting industry. I just been keeping my head down, just doing a podcast, talking to cool people and had no idea about all this other stuff that's going out there in this whole little other microsystems besides. Speaker 2: There's like so much choice today and we have to be really picky about who we're listening to, who we're getting information from. So it's good to know that there's some really good voices getting really good people on so that you can get the best stuff. Kevin King: One of the things I'm doing, I'm doing something wrong. You got to help me out here, David. The Kelsey brothers sold their podcast back in early September for a hundred million bucks. Two football players talking stuff and one of them dates, I guess that's what I'm doing wrong. I just figured out the answer. I need to date Taylor Swift. Speaker 2: That's the first step. That's the first step. Kevin King: Forget the $17 million I'm making in the NFL. I'm going to date her and that's an investment. That's going to make me some money. Speaker 2: I think even Prince Harry figured that one out too. First, you got to marry the celebrity and then you... Kevin King: That's the answer. I answered my own question. Yeah, then what Joe Rogan 250 million bucks I think it's his contract with Spotify and there's several others out there and it's big at this YouTube show I was just at in September. There's kids in there, 19 year old kids with 2 billion with a B views. And they don't know the first thing about products. They don't know the first thing about monetizing really other than they work off of CPMs. So they're working off of Amazon. Once you get to, I think it's 10,000 or 10,000, I can't remember on YouTube, followers or subscribers, you can actually monetize your channel. I think it's subscribers. You can monetize your channel. When YouTube puts ads in, they will pay you a fraction of that. So it's basically like someone saying the average is about $12 CPM. So per 1,000 views, it's $12. Now, I think the creator gets only about half of that and YouTube keeps the other half. But at 2 billion views, you can do the math on that. Over a couple of years, that's like $150,000 a month, at least, just in that portion. And then it was surprising to me how many of them don't know how to do UGC. This world that we know in the Amazon, we're always talking about getting people on TikTok. On Instagram and PromotoPros, a lot of these people don't come from that world. They don't know the first thing about it. It was surprising to me. They're just creating content, just creating shows and doing silly things and whatever, just making the money on the other side. They're not realizing how much money they're leaving on the table. I think at the same time, there's a lot of Amazon sellers that are not doing good YouTube, don't know what they're doing on YouTube and leaving a lot of money on the table. I saw some, I was in there brainstorming, listening to some of this content and I got, all right, if we marry these two things together, I think that some people can crush it. Are you doing anything at all on, out with UGC or YouTube or TikTok? Speaker 2: Well, YouTube, I've been doing YouTube since 2011. I have over 100 million views on YouTube. Kevin King: Oh, I had no idea. All right. All right. So I'm talking to one of those guys. OK. Speaker 2: This is from a totally different world in the financial sphere. And I just got into it as a passion. I'm an author of two books. So I just it just kind of snowballed from there, started doing some videos. But it is a very different world now than it was when I started. I never really had an intention to be, you know, a YouTuber per se. But I ended up getting, you know, I have 280,000 subscribers and so on. But when I found Amazon, I knew that it was a better business because it was much more scalable. I wasn't doing my best to sell products, to create my own products, to then have multiple lines of income coming through and using YouTube as sort of an advertising space. I definitely wasn't doing that. So I didn't do it in the best and most efficient way possible. It was just a passion project that happened to grow. Kevin King: So you're doing financial advice or what kind of stuff are you doing? Speaker 2: Yeah, financial news essentially, financial news. So if the Federal Reserve is going to do such and such an action, let's say they're going to cut interest rates on September 17th or 18th or whatever it is, then I would talk about the implications of that and what has come to this point. So really, really intricate details about a lot about the central banks and their activities globally. So, not the most fun stuff, but you know. Kevin King: 28,000 subscribers worth, there's people that want that. I mean, that's the beauty about it. It's just all these niches. That's right. You can drill down. Were you just doing what you love and it just came or were you optimizing and trying to like game the system and trying to grow it or were you just like, I'm just doing my thing and whatever comes, comes? Speaker 2: At the beginning, it was just, you know, I just want to post some stuff about this and, you know, hopefully some like-minded people will join and we can, you know, that will be fun to do. And then it sort of took off, took off so much that I was like, oh, okay, I didn't really even want to do this thing. But now I'm, hey, I'm making some a few bucks here. Let me, let me see what happens. But yeah, it definitely takes planning to create videos that keep people's attention, especially now with shorts. The way it's working, I could tell you this from experience, is that, and I'll tell you there's different reasons why, you have to pull people in from a short or you likely won't get their eyeballs. YouTube's algorithm is completely changed. We know that shorts are becoming more common. But in fact, what you'll see in a lot of comment sections, that people reference the fact that the short brought them there to the full version. And I'm seeing this pervasively across different videos and music videos and all kinds of different things where people are referencing that in the comments, the comments that are pushed to the top. So YouTube even wants that as part of their algorithm that, hey, I came from a short and now I'm at the long form video and I'm staying and I'm like, I'm here with everybody else. You get very low engagement with shorts, very low, and you also get very little income. So the whole game is create a short, bait people in, bring them into the full version. The full version, you bring them in as a subscriber. Hopefully you can keep them there for the duration of the video, but also to watch the next video. And that's how they do it today. Kevin King: The shorts are almost like an extended trailer in a way. You want to keep those under 10 minutes ideally. People are saying you actually need to put the shorts on a separate channel. Don't put them on the same channel because the algorithm looks at what else is there. You actually never want to start your YouTube channel with one video either if you can avoid it. You always want to start with 5 or 10 because if one of your videos is liked or catches the eye of the algorithm, then they look for other videos of you. And if there's nothing there, they go into somebody else. But you can grow your channel really quick if you start with 5 to 10 already in there. There's a lot of fascinating stuff, a lot of cool new tools that have come out and some AI tools. Like you said, in the Amazon game, we're all about titles. That's important on YouTube too. Titles are super important, but the thumbnail It's just like our main image is critical and there's people that that's all they do is they're thumbnail artists and they specialize. There's a Twitter channel or X channel that they do a thumbnail Thursdays. Like at eight o'clock central time on Thursdays, all these thumbnail designers get on there and they tear apart other thumbnails. Basically hash through this thumbnail sucks and this is why this guy should do this and this guy should do this. It's a science. It's just like they're analyzing every... In our product photography on Amazon, we teach people how to create a killer main image, but it seems like, at least to me, we don't go into the minute detail, like exactly what's in the background, exactly what's the story, exactly what does this connotate in two seconds or less as far as a story or an idea in your head. It's a whole different thing, but I think there's some things that we can adapt from what they're doing into what we're doing on the Amazon world and could be very valuable. Speaker 2: The competition is getting fierce on Amazon to say the least. When you look at how many different products are available to people today, they know that there's no friction in returns. So if you didn't convince them that this is a really good brand that they're buying into, they might get hesitation all the way up until that 30 days after purchasing it. They still have that opportunity to return it. So I think you've got to sell people right from that very first main image. And unfortunately, I've been burned in the past before with very mediocre companies that I don't want to call them photographers because that's an insult to some of these people who are professional photographers. But they don't understand how to capture the essence of what the product is. Solves like your product obviously is selling some sort of solution to this person's problem. They came to your listing to solve it. Even if it's I need to store my food in this Tupperware so that I can put it in my kids lunch. That's a problem that's being solved. And if we're not thinking of the customer in mind, we're just going to be taking a bunch of pictures and it's all going to be lost in the sea of a million other products. I know it's not always the best, like the highest reviews that get the best sales. Sure, you're competing against somebody who has 10,000 reviews and you have zero. It's a challenge. But there is a certain point at which it doesn't matter so much anymore. We can really, really do a lot with our photos. I think that's, in fact, the number one thing that we don't put enough attention into it. Kevin King: I agree. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time on keyword research and their title, but they cheap out on the photo. One, because for some people, it costs money to do it right. I mean, it used to cost a lot more money. Now, with AI and some of the things you can do, it's way down. But still, it takes money and a lot of people just don't understand it. They don't have that critical eye. They don't have that composition. They don't know how to compose photos properly. There's the rule of thirds, the tic-tac-toe board on how you position things and everything. A lot of people don't know that and nobody's really teaching that out there. I think there's a In fact, in September at the last Helium 10 Elite quarterly workshop in Seattle right before Accelerate, Destiny Wishon came on and talked about PPC. She's really good at what she does and all the intricacies of ACoS and tacos and all that kind of stuff. I did a presentation actually on advertising, the psychology of advertising. One of the things that I mentioned is you might want to consider actually developing your ad, your main image first before you develop the rest of the product. If you create an ad for a product, basically this is your 5x5 grid and this is the ad, then go to the product after that. So the other way around, developing the product and then coming up with the ad on it. Because it'll force you to think in a different way and you might modify the product or you might not do that product even though they might have a good opportunity on Amazon based on just critical numbers on a spreadsheet. But if you can't hit that emotional, if you can't solve a problem or give them a feeling, you can't hit that emotional touch point, you're not going to succeed. And I gave some examples of it. Here's a bunch of ads to show you exactly how to actually psychologically do this. And it's almost like image hacking. People seem to like that. I think we need more of that in the space, like you said, that we don't spend time. So what do you do when it comes to images? How are you doing your images? Speaker 2: I think what needs to be done is that we have to, well, here's one thing I wanted to mention is now with video, and if you're going to do the 360, you really have very few images to work with. Because I think this is speculation, but most people don't even know that you can click on an image to reveal all of the images. I think that they are just going to scroll. They're going to get your, I think it's four. They're going to get the four images and then they're going to see video and maybe the 360, if they'll even make it there. And it depends on mobile too. So we have like four images, including the main image to sell everything. And so what I do is paper and pen, write down what are the absolute key, based on keyword research and based on reviews, looking through the reviews, what are the key points that I need to sell to this customer? And then look at them and just like write everything out like a brainstorm. And then say to myself, which ones kind of go together? Like if I'm talking about the material of it, because that's like an important feature or whatever from this thing, then I could probably squeeze in, you know, two or three different aspects of that material. Okay, it's weatherproof. Okay, it's durable, whatever, something like this. I can kind of squeeze that in to one. Kevin King: Are you using the word weatherproof or durable? Are you using those words like in bullet points or in the image? Or are you using it towards, instead of taking that, describe it that actually means durable. A lot of people, they'll have bullet points, say waterproof, durable and whatever the other things are, but instead of durable, you want to kind of take a picture or emotion and you want to say something like, will last 20 years beyond your death or I don't know, some crazy, whatever. That instead of saying just durable, last seven generations or something like that. Speaker 2: Yes. Kevin King: So you're doing that kind of stuff. Okay. Speaker 2: Yeah, I just try to like when I'm thinking about the image. Which of these selling points do I need to get across to the customer and how roughly, at this point it's all rough, which sort of image can I take to get these things? Okay, I need a close-up image because we're going to show details of it. I want lifestyle image where it's shown in the setting of how people are actually going to use it. We need, of course, the white background image and these things. I can kind of get a rough storyboard of how I want those first four images. Those are my key ones. The other one's great, but I honestly believe few will see them. And then even A+, I think, is today even less important than it's ever been because of just short attention spans and everything else. Still there, still valid, still, of course, important to get it all in, but I just think that you have to sell it in those first four images and you really have to spend so much time planning those pictures. And I just think there's a saying that I heard once and I always think of it, it's measure twice, cut once. And I always just, it just always replays back in my head, like spend more time upfront and then do that action. And hopefully that will pay dividends for you. Kevin King: Anybody listening to this, if you are a Helium 10 member and you want to go back and look at the September Freedom Ticket training that I did. Every month we do a live webinar and then the replay gets put into the Freedom Ticket area. Go look at the September 6th one that I did on marketing and differentiation. And you'll actually see exactly how to do an image stack that I did for one of my products and how those first four are critical and how I used them to sell a $55 set of three bully sticks when everybody else is selling 30 bully sticks for 30 bucks. And I'll use that image stack to justify that. I recommend everybody go back and take a look at that. Let's go take a step back real quick. So you were doing financial stuff and then you got just said, I get enough of this YouTube. I want more control. I want something that is more scalable, not just requires me. So how did you stumble upon? What year was that? And how did you stumble upon the Amazon stuff? Speaker 2: It's a funny thing. So I started YouTube 2011. Years passed and I'm doing it. I wrote two books, all these things. Kevin King: Was this a full time gig on YouTube or was this a side hustle? Speaker 2: Yeah, it started as a side hustle, but then it became full-time. And then I heard about Amazon. Of course, there's all these different business models. I'm hearing about dropshipping. I'm hearing whatever. And within three, maybe within a two-week period, From three different places, I heard about Amazon FBA. That was the first time I've heard about Amazon FBA, but it all happened within a two-week period. I was like, I think I should be looking into this. What is this thing? I'm into it. I'm watching it. What year is this? This is 2017. And I'm like, this is interesting, because I didn't know that. I didn't understand FBA. I knew, OK, you can sell products on Amazon, but I thought it was more like eBay kind of thing. And I'm like, this is interesting. OK, I'm going to check this out. So I started watching the videos. I took one of those guru courses. Kevin King: You don't want any names? Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't at the Freedom Ticket Originals. I'll be honest, but I did watch that and the new version 4.0. I took one of those guru courses. Thank God it was good enough to get me going. I realized that the guru didn't actually sell on Amazon, but he gave me the instructions to sort of get along. And I did and launched a product. Funny story about the product was. I'm selling. It's doing so well. Like I can't keep the stock. It's going crazy. And six months into it, I get an email notice. You're selling a restricted product. I go, oh no. And just to back up, I looked at this product. I'm like, I don't know if this is an FDA type of product. I emailed, I got three email confirmations from Amazon saying that this is not a restricted product. And that of course means nothing, seller support. They told me in the end, they told me, yeah, we told you that before, but not anymore. So yeah, so six months in, I got screwed over and then fighting back, trying to fight back and forth. They weren't having it. So that product... I killed it right there and then I just went on to go back to the drawing board, product research again. I used the Helium 10 tools actually to find that product and I just went from there and I've been selling that brand. So in 2018 into 2019, I think 2018 was probably when I started it. That's when I started this brand that I currently sell today. Kevin King: What category are you in or products? Speaker 2: I'm in like house products, home and household. Kevin King: You know, here's something that's interesting to me. You know, notice how David just, I sold that product. I sold, I'm in home and household, but he didn't say what he sells. This is a thing in Amazon space. It makes sense in the early days, like 2015, 2016, nobody would ever say what they sell because they're afraid that someone's just going to knock them off. They're afraid, oh, I'm going to get hijackers. I'm going to get someone on my listing. Someone's just going to see that I'm doing well on this. They're going to go find it on Alibaba, stick their name on it, and be my next competitor. Back then, that was probably a valid concern, but nowadays, with the way Amazon is, I think it's much less of a concern. I noticed this in other industries. People talk about their products. You're a Shopify seller. I meet someone at YouTube show that sells on Shopify. They tell me exactly what they sell. They're not worried about it, but as soon as you meet an Amazon seller, it's like prying. Prying teeth out of them to actually get them to tell you what unless they've got a big moat around it. You know strong IP and a big moat. They won't tell you. I had the same problem. I did a think tank in Austin which went really really well in September. Had 12 people that paid to come and have for two hours had seven experts and a moderator sit at a table and basically dial in on their exact problems and their exact pain point to actually solve people solve their problems and some of them walked away from that crying like this has been so profound so I This has been the best decision I ever made in my life to actually come to this. It's called Market Masters. I'll probably do another one next year. To come to this and get this direct advice, you can go to a Helium 10 conference or you can go to any Amazon conference and some of the stuff applies to you, some of it doesn't. This is very tuned in. We're with experts curated to your needs, but selling this thing was a nightmare because people, nobody's like, yeah, that sounds cool, but ain't no way I'm sitting in a chair and telling seven other big time Amazon freaking people what I sell, because they'll just knock me off. The mentality, they'll just knock me off. I think what needs to shift, and a lot of that's from the training and the guru training, is the way people actually are developing products and the way that this notion of Find a hole on Amazon, a keyword hole, go find a product on Alibaba, stick a logo on it and put it up. It needs to go away, especially in the days of the new Timu, what Timu is doing and what Amazon is doing, basically knocking off Timu, helping factories go direct on Amazon. You need to target an audience, an avatar, and create a brand. So what are you doing with this home stuff to actually do that and not just be, let me find a keyword opportunity that someone's missing out on on Amazon, but actually create an audience, an avatar, and a true brand? Speaker 2: When I first started, learned from the gurus. The guru doesn't even sell, but it allowed me to get in. The first product I sold was a Me Too product. No question about it, straight from Alibaba, Me Too product. What it allowed me to do was to gain the confidence to then sell the next product, to launch new products, to start to develop a real brand. I get about 3,000 searches in a given month on Amazon for my brand name. Kevin King: And that's actually good. I mean, that's my rule. I always tell people that is 3,000 searches for the brand name alone means you're actually become a brand. If you're not getting 3,000 searches, if you're getting less than that on your brand name standalone, then you're not a brand yet. I just made that rule up. That's just my little arbitrary line. So that's good. That's good, David. Speaker 2: Yeah. But at first, what I needed was, can I even do this? I'm like, I'm just going to go for it. I'm just going to try it. Let me see what happens. With really a small minimum of investment, I think I probably put in $2,000. That first order was about $2,000 or something. Not knowing anything and it ended up working. I could see that I was selling. I could see people were giving it positive reviews. That is unsustainable long-term. Me Too products, you'll just get crushed because of the competition. They'll run most prices down. But I think if people can just sell a product online, like anything, like even sell like 20 products, 20 units. They will gain the confidence to then sell a real product that they want later. As we got further along, then we had to create a new mold for the product that fixed the issues of the previous model. Of course, this was a long time in the making. There was bad reviews, some bad reviews. Overall, even that earlier model was getting 4.6 in that range, but there was definitely some bad reviews. I knew there was an issue. I'm talking to my supplier and just saying, these are the problems I'm having, constantly feeding them the problems and saying, can this be solved? Can this be adjusted? What can be done? There's like pushback, you know, back and forth, but ultimately we got that done. So, um, you know, it, it was a long time coming. I just think for people, they don't have the confidence that they can even, they work a nine to five job. They're like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I feel like it should be done in stages. Like, can you even sell? Kevin King: I agree with you. I mean, I agree with you that on it, to start a true brand and go in this like the quote-unquote right way, it can be daunting, especially if you don't have experience on that. So actually getting your feet wet with something a little bit simpler that you're not trying to quit your job off of, you're not trying to, if it takes off, great, awesome, but you're not really trying to, you're just trying to figure it out. I did that I was selling on Amazon since 2001, but I wasn't doing the FBA model until 2015. So in 2015, before I actually launched, I launched five brands almost back to back. But before I did that, I was like, I need to figure out how do I ship something in Amazon? How does a listing work? How does this work? And so I just did arbitrage for like a month. I was hitting Walmart and the dollar stores and there's a sauce company here in Texas, Salt Lick, that has their own like little barbecue sauce and they weren't on Amazon. So I went and bought a couple of cases from them, threw it up on there. Just to learn how it works. So I agree with you on that and that's kind of what you went through is like you went through that process and now, okay, now I get it. Now I know what I need to do. Now I see the opportunities and now let me do this right. Speaker 2: I feel like for a lot of people that I talk to, so from my YouTube thing, I ended up getting a small group of people together who want to sell and just like, hey, if you want me to help you out, I'll help you out. With these people, there's such hesitation. And they just aren't certain about, you know, I don't know, am I making the right choice? Am I doing this and that? And just really trying to emphasize to them, like, you can do it. You can do it. Like, look at who your competition is. A lot of times it's these Chinese sellers that are all about price, terrible photos. Like, everything is not good about the listing except for the attractive price. And I'm like, you can do so much better. Think about what you're doing, your nine to five job. You do so much hard work. You know, maybe You've got a family. You've got all these things that are so difficult. You can do these things. You can do it. I'm just trying to give them the confidence. Kevin King: Is this something you do? Do you just volunteer this or is this like a paid little thing? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a paid group, but it's not paid much. It's just something that I want to help people because I felt like the guru thing was After watching the course and realizing, I'm like, man, this guy didn't know what he was doing. And then I learned just through failing. Obviously, I failed pretty bad there. And just trying to hopefully get people up to speed and they can get out of their 9 to 5 job because I hated my 9 to 5 job. I can definitely tell you that. I worked for a financial company and it wasn't the best time. Kevin King: I can tell by the pronunciation of a few words, you're Canadian, right? Speaker 2: That's right. Kevin King: I can tell by the pronunciation of a couple of those words. Have you always been in Canada or do you live in the States at all? Speaker 2: I was born and raised in cold Canada. That's right. Kevin King: Not all of Canada is cold. Some areas are actually pleasant, but what part of Canada are you in? Speaker 2: I'm in Toronto, but the summer is this short. Kevin King: Well, half the population of Canada, I think, is in Toronto. I just saw some stats. Like the Toronto metro area, not Toronto proper, but when you build in the whole metro area, it's something like 10 million, 9-10 million people or something, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, we gained about a million in like one year. So, it's like this unsustainable growth path. Yeah, it's a place not for entrepreneurs and that's sort of the one thing that I would say is not good about it, definitely. So it's hard. It's harder to grow when you're up here in the cold. Kevin King: What do you think it is? I just heard something. I think it was on my first Million Podcast recently. They were talking to this British guy and he was talking about the difference in attitude in the States versus England. He's talking about July 4th. He was here for his first July 4th and he was just amazed at how many flags there were everywhere, how many people. We're doing fireworks and wearing red, white and blue and clapping and having fun and doing all this." He said, it wasn't until I saw July 4th here, I had to go look it up. When is British Independence Day? I had no idea. It's King George's Day or something like on April 23rd or something like that. Nobody celebrates it really. We don't have this sense of patriotism like you have in the United States. You can be somewhere in the United States and someone will say something and the crowd just starts chanting USA, USA, or you have jets flying over the stadium at football games, military jets and stuff right after the national anthem. But that extends to business, I think. And there's something about the US. There's parts of the US that are really bad, not good. There's parts of America that are really good. But one of those is entrepreneurship. And it seems like there is no better place in the world to actually get a leg up or to start or to build a business than the United States. Speaker 2: There's no question about it. From my perspective, I completely agree. Kevin King: What do you think that is? Speaker 2: It starts with the availability of everything. Let's say services. Oh, I want to get a particular bank. Let's just say, oh, that's not available to Canadians. Oh, I want to get access to this thing. Oh, it's not available to Canadians. Like you go to the drop-down list and there's like, you know, it's just I'm not there. I'm not able to get it. So TikTok shop, you want to sell on TikTok shop? Sorry, we only allow Americans. Oh, I have my ITIN. I have my EIN. No, no, no. You got to be from United States. So like all the way from there. But in terms of like Independence Day on July 1st, we have Canada Day and people do celebrate and so on. But what has happened is like it's I know a lot of people that they come to Canada if they can't get into the US. It's like, okay, okay, we can't get into the US, no way. We'll go to Canada, we'll try later. Like that sort of mentality. It's like, yeah, it's a good place to stop along the way. It's, you know, I'm telling you. Kevin King: Stop in Canada, take a piss and get some sodas, get some ketchup chips and then move on our way. Speaker 2: That's right. Like I know people that literally... Kevin King: The little thing with fries and a little sauce on it, what's that called? Bully, you know, what's it called? Big in Canada. Speaker 2: Oh, the poutine. Kevin King: Poutine, that's it. Yeah, poutine. It's a poutine. Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah, it's just unfortunately the way it is and they're not going to change that. They're not going to change that. It's a very socialist kind of place. It's not a place for entrepreneurship. I mean, let's just be clear about that. And so that makes doing things business more difficult. So I would not invest in Canada, that's for sure. But the US has so many advantages. People don't realize this. As an American, even as a Canadian too, we have a safety net. We have things that allow you to just say, I'm just going to give this a try. Too many people are stuck in where they are and they're miserable about everything. Instead, just take the leap. Give it a go and try to make it happen. I just know too many people that they say they want to do stuff, but You never end up doing it. You have so many opportunities as American, Canadian, whatever, but especially in the US. I mean, there's so many people around that are just so driven. They're so driven. It's amazing. Kevin King: So what do you think it is for someone outside the United States that's like, they hear about the FBA like you did. They're like, okay, I'm going to sell, but I live in Italy, but I'm not going to sell on Amazon Italy. I'm going to go to the United States and sell because that's where a lot of the cool training is based. It's where a lot of the action is. Like you just said, I don't know this culture that well. I've seen stuff on TV. I've seen some TV shows. I met a few Americans passing through at the pizza shop or whatever, but I'm nervous about this. What are some of the hurdles you see that maybe international sellers that are coming into the US market, besides a language barrier for some of them, are having and how do they overcome that? Speaker 2: For a lot of people that are selling coming from international, I think they love, number one, they love to look at the US market because they see the dollar signs. But I would have to say though, some of those people do sell onto the European markets, which is crazy because of the difficulty just to get in on them. But I just think that they have to understand the American consumer just like you would any other consumer. You still need to know, you're going to hear the term avatar, you still need to know who is ultimately buying your product. And keeping it in mind, like when I talk to my supplier, they tell me something and I literally will tell them, you do not understand the American consumer. They don't want to see that. And just off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples, but I've said this to them multiple times before. I'm like, you don't understand. You don't understand it. And I try to explain, this is what they want to see. And largely Canadian and American consumers, you know, approximately the same. So the listings and everything would translate, but perhaps in Europe and things, it might be a little bit different. I've heard the German market's really different and everything else, but I just think you've got to understand it. And the best way to do that, better than keywords, Keywords is key, but no pun intended, but the reviews are like, they just have so much knowledge and we can use the AI to summarize that and everything, but I also like just reading the reviews. I just like to get the whole context of what they're talking about. Kevin King: You can get inside someone's head sometimes in those reviews and you see their language patterns and the way they're describing things and sometimes the emotion will come out in reviews. You can understand someone a little bit better. Video reviews are even better if you're able to watch video reviews of somebody. Speaker 2: Bradley talks about the collagen peptides thing and he said this for years. He was saying, you look at the keywords and you don't see coffee mentioned anywhere. Now today you do, but years ago when he started looking at it, because that was his default, like instead of garlic press, he would look at collagen peptides. And then in the reviews, it would say, in my coffee, in my coffee, in my coffee, but that's not a keyword. And so if you're just looking at the keywords, you're never going to see these people put the collagen peptides in their coffee and use it like a creamer to thicken it up. So that's like information you'll only get from reviews. Kevin King: What are you doing with this big push that Amazon's doing towards AI? Are you paying attention to this right now with like Rufus and Cosmo and making any changes or are you just kind of waiting it out to see what happens? What are your thoughts and what are you doing in regards to this AI change that we see coming? Speaker 2: Number one, I'm bullish long-term about AI. I think it is not there yet in what they want. I've seen on X a lot of talk about how Rufus is spitting back some information that's like not even making sense. It's like out of the 12,000 reviews and the product has like 70 reviews, It's just, is it even reading the right data? They don't even know. They'll get there. They'll get there eventually. I think it should have been left in beta. What I am doing is when I go back to the drawing board of my images, which I had done recently to make sure that the pictures tell a thousand words. That's really what I've tried to do so that the image itself shows the context of how the product is supposed to be used. So that if I were to feed that to ChatGPT and say, hey, what's going on in this picture without showing any text on it, it would understand what's being done there. Kevin King: That's an interesting actually approach. That's actually a good little technique is actually take your images, stick them into ChatGPT or Plexi or Cloud or whatever, or there's actually some image analyzation tools. I've mentioned those like on the Helium 10 Elite a couple of times. That will analyze and ask it what it thinks is going on. And if it comes back with something totally different than what you intended or what the intended use is, you may need to make some changes to those photos. Go through iterations of that until it gets it right four or five times in a row of what you're actually trying to do. I would use several different LLMs and see how they all, because some of them can interpret it totally differently. That's actually a good approach to take. Amazon has Comprehend. Amazon Comprehend, that's part of AWS that you can actually get in and it will analyze the images from Amazon's lens. Which is actually a pretty cool little thing and they actually give you a score. If you go back on one of the episodes in May, towards the end of May, I think in May 20th or May 27th, somewhere around that time, Matt Altman was on the AM-PM Podcast and he talked about using Amazon Comprehend and how you can upload your images into Amazon Comprehend on AWS. I think it's free. You just got to have an AWS account and you actually, it will analyze it and it'll give you a score. It'll say on a scale of 1 to 100, you're an 82. And you really want to be, I think he said, I can't remember the exact words, you want to be above a 90 or 95. And so they would go back and they would change something in the image or change something in the listing because it also looks at the listing and change something in the listing and then resubmit it. And like 30 minutes later, come back with a new score. It's almost like if you ever sent, if you've ever done mass emails and you send something first before you send a big email out to a spam checker, and I'll say this has these seven words in it are triggers for spam. If you take these seven words out, you know, guarantee, free, money back, whatever. Your likelihood of going into the inbox versus the spam folder goes up X amount. It's kind of like that. So that's another way you can do it. But AI, I think a lot of people, AI, It's a great tool. And if you use AI tools properly, not letting AI do everything, but use the tools for analysis, analyzation, to automate like mundane tasks and steps is a major, major advantage that people are into that have right now. Are you doing, are you using any AI tools when it comes to your Amazon listing? Are you using any of the review analyzation tools or the list building tools or the split testing image tools or anything like that? Speaker 2: I've been using, so when GPT first came out, I immediately, I'm like, I need to immediately do something about this. That was in the earlier days of AI. I started using that. Then Helium 10 brought in their Tools as well, both on the reviews side as well as listing builder. Just checked it out. I like to use them as sort of, okay, give me a good base to work with and then let me... I love that it does the hard work for me. I've told them, I've gone into ChatGPT and kind of given a list of all my keywords and said, these are the most important in order. And I want to fit these in. And this will be like for backend description, for instance, I got a plus content, but I can stick it in the backend here. And it just can fit it in in such a way that would take me hours to do, but it's doing it in, you know, five seconds. So that's the things that I've, I've done a lot of, and it just helped me build a stronger listing and just take a lot of the workload. It's not something that I, of course I could do that too, but it just makes the process really easier. Kevin King: How are you staying on top of what's happening in Amazon right now? What do you do? I know you're in Helium 10 Elite. Yes. You're an elite member. You participate in a lot of the weekly mastermind sessions and on the trainings and stuff. I know you're in a few other Facebook groups and stuff. I see you posting from time to time like Lunch with Norm and some of that stuff. What is your main way of staying on top of your game? I mean, you got to stay on top of your product and what's happening when it comes to the money side of things, but also you got to stay a step ahead when it comes to what's coming next. What's Teemu up to? What's Amazon doing? What's EA doing? What do you do? What do you follow? Speaker 2: I completely transformed my ex to get rid of all the nonsense that's there and all the silly videos and stuff. I unfollowed a couple of people and I followed a whole bunch of people. One of them that was recommended by you, Steve Rolle. I went from one of your newsletters, I found him, then I found Molson Hart, then I found all these other people that are basically actually selling. Not like selling their course and like promoting Amazon, but they actually sell. The guy from Simple Modern was doing like nine figures on there. The guy Zulay Kitchen, they're all posting. Content on there and there's such good information that's being given out on X. You've got to weed out all that not so good stuff. But I find it to be amazing because my whole timeline is just filled, absolutely filled with Amazon related content every day or e-commerce related content. So that to me has been incredible. Kevin King: Are you doing anything on LinkedIn at all? Speaker 2: I don't. I don't. I find LinkedIn, I know LinkedIn is really good for certain things, but I find it too much like rah-rah, like, you know, hey, congratulations on your promotion sort of thing versus X is like, if your content is not good, the algorithm won't feed it. It's like you got to work hard for those likes and those views. So that's the way I see it. But I know there's a lot of Amazon guys that are doing LinkedIn. Kevin King: It seems like LinkedIn maybe is more people, they're service providers trying to provide value in the hopes that you then turn around and use their company versus what I'm seeing on X, because I monitor a lot of this stuff for my newsletter, is like you just said, these are people actually selling and they're providing value just to help other people just because they love to do this or they've discovered something and they're just sharing it. I found that the content typically is a little more dialed in on X and less promotional. Speaker 2: It's raw. You know, it's like you're getting the guy posting a picture of his kid maybe but then the next minute he's like, oh yeah, by the way, I lost a thousand units at Amazon and so you're getting like a really raw. Kevin King: You've been a Helium 10 Elite member for a while. Why did you decide to do Helium 10 Elite and what benefit are you getting from it, if any? Speaker 2: Yeah, basically, the one thing was trying to find other people doing the same thing as you. And you have questions and you can't go ask your buddy from high school, you can't go ask your mom and dad, you got to find people. So you go online and it's I don't like the people that just go and complain about Amazon. Oh, Amazon's increasing the fees. It's all over now or whatever. I want people who are actually doing stuff, who are actually making it happen. And what are they doing? I want to learn from them too. And so we all teach each other. We all learn from each other. We ask questions. Hey, did you guys see this? It's a good place to be because you're all in that same space. You're all trying to grow your business. I've been enjoying it the whole time and it's good. Then you've got the Facebook group, which is more in between the weekly sessions. We can post stuff in there. Kevin King: You've been doing this since 2017. You started this brand that's actually working for you now around 2018. That's almost coming up on seven years, six plus years, almost seven on that brand. What's the goal? Is this seven-figure brand, eight-figure brand? What's the goal? Is it a solid seven-figure brand? Speaker 2: I've been playing around with the idea of selling. I've talked to brokers. I've spoke to Seller X, who just recently had some issues. But that was during the peak, by the way. And they approached me, which is funny. But I also wonder if that's the right course of action. I don't know. I've been considering that. I feel confident enough to be able to find new products and new brands and new things. It's a hard road at the beginning, but I'm not scared of it anymore as I was in the absolute beginning. So it could be a way to kind of cash out. The only problem is, different story, Canada, US. In Canada, if you sell your company, you'll be taxed Your great-grandchildren will be taxed. You'll be paying that tax. Whereas in the US, you've spoken about it before where there's something to do in the first 30 days of your setting up that business. If you do something, then you get so much. There's so many cool things with the US. Kevin King: Are you a Canadian-based business then, not US-based? Speaker 2: Yes. Kevin King: Canadian-based. All right. Speaker 2: So, you gotta take it slow. Unknown Speaker: That's a fact. Kevin King: You dug your own grave on that one. Speaker 2: Living here, you gotta face that music regardless. Even if you had an LLC or C Corp or whatever. But yeah, that's kind of the things longer term, I'm not so sure. But I love the idea of an exit and starting over right from scratch again. Not then going becoming a guru, but you know, starting it off all again. Kevin King: So what drives you in this business? What is it that makes you get up every morning and go, man, I love what I'm doing? Speaker 2: I love the scalability. I think it's so cool. And the fact that I literally, I'll be in like Cayman Islands and I'm like, you know, on my phone and I'm like, okay, still selling. Like, you know, it's just that, that's so cool. That's the coolest thing I feel ever. Like, you know, you're, you could literally be anywhere in the world. It's like those videos that sell you on some course or whatever, but like, this is real and you could actually I don't want to be anywhere doing the same thing. I don't even keep files on my computer, my desktop at all. Everything is cloud. So I'm like 100% in the cloud. I love the whole idea. I think it's the coolest thing in the world. Not quite James Bond 007, but it's pretty cool. Kevin King: That's why I do it. We do it for the freedom. It's a really good business to be in and it can be difficult at times and stressful at times but it's still and you can lose a lot of money sometimes but still probably one of the best opportunities in the last hundred plus years in business is to actually do the FBA model starting out on Amazon and hopefully extending beyond that at some point. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. Kevin King: David, I really appreciate you coming on. If people want to follow you, I guess you must be on X then, if they want to follow you on X or somewhere else because you must be posting occasionally just to keep up with the Joneses, something like that. How do they find you? What do they do? Speaker 2: You can find me on X. You can get me at TheMoneyGPS on X. TheMoneyGPS. And you'll find me and I hope to see you there. Kevin King: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, man. We'll see you in the Helium 10 Elite, one of the next calls, I'm sure. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. And if you really like the AM-PM Podcast, if you've been listening to this for a while, refer a friend. Tell someone out there in the space, like, hey, you got to check this out. Message them. Send them a DM. Say, hey, I don't know if you've been listening to the AM-PM Podcast, but you might enjoy this or if you have an episode that was your favorite, be sure to send that on to somebody so that they can take a look at that and maybe get some benefit from this podcast as well because that's why I'm doing this. I'm trying to help you out and tell stories, untold stories and give you some valuable insights since hopefully you've been getting that. If you have, I'll look forward to seeing you again next week for the next episode of AM-PM Podcast. But before we go, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. It's totally free every Monday and Thursday, BillionDollarSellers.com. And I just want to leave you some words of parting wisdom. You know, it's the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life. The quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your life. So invest in your relationships, even those that might seem a little inconsequential. You just never know where it's going to come around and make a huge difference. See you again next week.